I only write about art by living artists on show within walking distance of my central London flat. It must be available for anyone to see without charge, whether in a public or private gallery or any other space, inside or out,.

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Friday, 24 October 2014

I only had about four "art" lessons at school but I remember the rubric well. First you paint something or someone on your paper and then you chose a background colour which "goes with" or matches what's already there. You then fill in the gaps.

Nick Archer certainly did not go to the same school...His painterly process is to pour vivid combinations of colour onto canvasses on the floor of his studio. The colours bleed and merge into each other changing shape as if the paintings almost paint themselves. When nearly dry he fixes the canvases to the wall. He then "weaves his chosen image into the rich texture of the oily ground, making sense of the random floods of colour, balancing the complex accidental surfaces and the marks of the artist".Safe is a large painting which draws you inexorably into the wood. The candy colours signal that this is no ordinary forest. The trees are so tall they seem to penetrate the sky. Does the caravan suggest solitude or abandonment? There is an eerie but attractive ordinariness about the scene. "Archer ...creates...a resonant atmospheric experience for the viewer to contemplate as they are cast adrift in his paradise". I'm reminded of the magical realism which streams through Peter Doig’s work.

Nick Archer, MORT.2014.oil on copper'45 x 35 cm

This tree looks dead, it is the colour of death, and the title tells us we are right. But look again. What a travesty to talk of death in front of this sprightly creature, with its delicate limbs, its muscular upward thrust and its sinuous defiance against the background of a wind-driven sky?

Ultimately
Archer brings an open-mindedness to his artistry, so that - unlike what
happens when facing a history painting - the viewer has to provide the
story.

What is
it with group photographs? Why do we choose them? I have an image of my mother
standing with doleful eyes among a row of pupils at a village school in
Bedfordshire. It's the only picture I have of her as a child. Twenty years ago,
when trippers landed at the Greek island of Symi, they were happily coralled
into groups by the local photographer. The prints were hung on a line to dry,
ready to buy before the return journey.

The dellightful and intriguing image
above is Part One of a diptych of group formations of costumed figures
assembled and ordered by the conventions of the school portrait. It’s familiar –
yet refreshingly new. Susannah Douglas works mainly with drawing and site- specific collage.
And she is doing so at a time when the utilitarian, mechanised and throwaway
nature of photocopies contrasts with the legacy of the portrait and portraiture.
Historically the latter have stood for wealth, durability and the unique. But what
happens to consistency in a culture of easy reproduction when to cut, paste and
copy is only two clicks away?

The
artist has written eloquently about her working methods in the Jerwood Drawing
Prize catalogue referenced below

60 Minutes' Silence by Gillian Wearing

I’m reminded that nearly 20 years ago another
artist took a fresh look at group photographs. Gillian Wearing won the Turner
Prize in 1997 with 60 minutes' silence,
which looks like a photograph but is in fact a video of 26 police officers who agreed
to stand absolutely still for an hour The Daily Telegraph's art critic Richard
Dorment described ' how one officer succeeded in remaining near-motionless the
whole time until told that time was up. He then "lets out a yelp of relief
that you can hear all over the gallery. The moment is like a dam bursting. His
final, cathartic, joyful cry is one of the great moments in the history of
recent British art’.

So why choose this particular work? It demonstrates the subtlety and directness of
drawing. And the subject matter touches on an English legacy of love for caravans which stretches back to Elizabeth van Arnim's The Caravaners and Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows, published within a year of each other at the beginning of the 20th century.

The artist found the wallpaper pasted in
an old caravan she lived in for a while. She says "I had wanted to track
the symmetrical, repetitive arrangement of the pattern, yet knowing the error
of my eye and the inadequacy of my hand would lead the flowers to deviate
from their regimented alignment to cause fluctuation, animation and disorder:
an approximation
of life". So her beautiful drawing is not of flowers which have been pressed into service as wallpaper, but of a subject matter which shimmers with a contained, pastoral world of romance and travel and discovery.

It is not just the extraordinary detail which makes each flower head look freshly minted, nor the pattern of blooms which flow so beautifully and organically, bursting in from the left. Look too at the space, the
white emptiness, the peace.

(Drawing) is often an art of absence, a whisper as opposed to a declaration; a suggestion
rather than a certitude’.